I did write in an earlier post that one core SEO element every website needs is a sitemap. If you use WordPress, Concrete5, Joomla, or similar CMS systems for your website, it’s very easy to create a quick XML sitemap with a click. Then, if you follow my tips in the aforementioned post, you will promptly submit the sitemap to Google Search Console to be indexed.
However, just throwing a sitemap at Google isn’t a guarantee. A sitemap makes indexing easier for Google, and it tells Google that hey, you should really look into indexing these pages. Think of it as leading a horse to water. You’re telling the horse, hey, there’s water here, but the horse may not deem it worthy of drinking (or maybe he’s just not thirsty). Regardless, the water is important, and the horse now knows where it is when he’s ready to drink. The question is, how is the quality of that water? Is it full of chemicals? Is it littered with trash? Is it crystal clear? Is it delicious? Is this really worthy for other horses to drink?
When Google sends those spiders to crawl through your site via the guidance of the sitemap, they’re pondering similar questions. How good is this content? Will users search for it and find what they need? How much of this is all fluff and no substance? Why is this “Thank you for your purchase!” page in the sitemap? Are the other pages in the sitemap that useless for search?
Clean up your XML sitemap!
Chances are, people won’t be searching for content contained in ALL of your pages. No one will search for the purchase confirmation page example I included above. They won’t search for user login pages, comment pages, or any pages that are part of a sale but are not the landing page for the product or service. If all of these pages are on your sitemap, Google will think that you deem all of these pages worthy of indexing, and they will heartily disagree. As such, you will drop in the search rankings. If Google doesn’t find your site to have quality content thanks to your XML sitemap, it won’t usher users to find it via search.
Comb through your various pages and sort out which ones have good content and which ones are utility pages like those listed above. Remove all of your utility pages from your sitemap. If your site uses WordPress or Drupal, I heartily recommend the Yoast SEO plugin. Yoast makes it incredibly easy to add pages to the “noindex” meta robot parameters or robots.txt. file.
If a plugin isn’t an option to help you sift through the pages, you’ll have to manually add them to your robots.txt as “noindex.”
If you aren’t sure you’ve sorted out all of the utility pages, do a site:search on Google for a listing of all of your pages Google has indexed. From there, mark the pages due for a culling.
Don’t go crazy with the Cheez Whiz.
Many people confuse “noindex” with “nofollow” in with robots.txt, and there’s a very distinct difference between the two! “Noindex” means do not index this page. “Nofollow” means this page never existed. Somewhere along the line, SEO experts advised all web creators to set links and pages as “nofollow” in order to capture that cornerstone content. They believe that by using “nofollow,” the keywords they’re trying to implement won’t be tagged along with that outbound link, thus not giving the linked site any SEO credit.
Unfortunately, that’s not entirely the case. “Nofollow” does mean “don’t follow the links outbound from page,” that part is accurate. But that also means all of that link juice you accumulated from the outbound link is wiped clean.
Mark all of your utility pages as “noindex,follow” in your robots.txt. Do not mark anything on your quality content pages.
If you need help cleaning up your XML sitemap, I’m more than happy to do so! Contact me and we’ll work on a little housekeeping for your sitemap.
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